Creative pursuits
Visitors to the CS 50 Fair on Dec. 9 were welcomed — or, rather, pelted — with baby-blue stress balls. The greeting, by laughing students in Angry Birds costumes, gave way to a bustling scene — crowds, music, candy, popcorn, and (of course) hundreds of laptops. The event at the Northwest Science Building represented the culmination of the introductory computer science course known as “CS 50.” Consistently one of the most popular undergraduate courses at Harvard, CS 50 defies convention. A large portion of the class had stayed up all night the previous weekend at the Microsoft-sponsored Hackathon. To resolve any last-minute bugs before their projects went live, students helped one another, aided by pizza at 8 p.m., Chinese at 1 a.m., and pancakes at 5 a.m. (for anyone still typing). “It’s always striking, just how much they end up teaching themselves by semester’s end,” said instructor David Malan, senior lecturer in computer...